2003 Projects
Green Laboratories
Sponsor
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ECO
Intern Manager
Jessica Woolliams, Coordinator, Longwood Green Campus Initiative (now the Longwood Green Campus Initiative), Harvard Green Campus Initiative (HGCI)
Intern
Matt Lloyd is native to New England, having grown up in Beverly, MA. He completed his undergraduate degree in Environmental Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Of the Green Labs internship, Matt said, "I was excited to do this because I was interested in progressive industrial hygiene, and the Labs 21 project has served as an intersection of health-and-safety matters and energy-efficiency and pollution prevention." In the future, Matt intends to continue his work combining his interests in worker health and safety and environmental sustainability.
General Purpose
The overall goal of this project was to bring together the best thinking (current research and best practices) and the right people (academics, staff and industry representatives) to begin to map out a path to more environmentally and socially sustainable lab guidelines.
The intern compiled academic research useful to directing best practices and a future course of action to constructively influence the revisions to and uniformity of laboratory design and operations to improve lab safety, efficiency and environmental performance.
Background
Laboratories, in the words of Don Prowler, attract the greatest intellectual and economic resources of our society. Within the university context, laboratories also represent the most energy and water consumptive building typology. While a very wide range of resource-intensive technologies are installed in a wide variety of laboratories, the collective impact of all campus laboratory fume hoods place them at the top of the list for energy intensive technologies within campus laboratories. In essence, the laboratory fume hood represents the most energy-consumptive devise operating within the most energy-consumptive building typology within the most energy-intensive universities in the world.
The fume hood is designed to satisfy a convergence of human health, environmental, research and financial needs. A cohesive set of fume hood and associated laboratory ventilation standards, as well as a methodology for ongoing performance testing is essential for the university sector to be able to optimize the financial, environmental and human health performance of laboratories. Yet presently, the codes and standards for laboratory ventilation and fume hoods are contradictory and often not based on a scientific understanding of operational safety.
Overview of Tasks
The intern met with a steering group of core representatives of faculty and staff from Harvard and other universities to assess the research tasks below and drew the active participation of the laboratory industry into a forum for the purpose of addressing the research. Such a forum shaped the center of collective intelligence for the research project.
Research included the following:
- compiling and clarifying the governing ventilation and fume hood standards and codes for a diverse range of university laboratory facilities
- outlining in which cases the codes are based on operational safety and in which cases research needs to be done to understand the relationship between the codes or standards and operational safety
- identifying the opinions and attitudes of laboratory professionals utilizing existing codes and standards, and their opinions and knowledge about the safety, financial and environmental implications of different codes and standards
- developing an assessment of actual ventilation and fume hood performance requirements leading to a new set of performance recommendations for the university sector
- identifying a methodology for testing ventilation and fume hood performance over the life of the laboratory
- compiling a variety of laboratory design best practices to inform future university lab design, renovation and maintenance
Deliverables
The intern provided a report to the EPA, HGCI and the steering group members. This report summarizes the intern's work and input of the steering committee. It also recommends a course of action for research, policy and ongoing information sharing.